Wednesday, March 6, 2013

sex IS NOT EFFICIENT

What Sex Can Teach Us About Our Energy Future

Simply being “efficient” isn’t enough.

One of the great hopes for our energy future is solar power, and we
have applied our technological gifts to the design and manufacture of
contraptions that can convert sunlight into electricity
Photo by Yuriko Nakao/Reuters

Living things are the most incredible machines, honed for efficiency
by millions of years of evolution. Many of our most advanced
technologies attempt to emulate them but, more often than not, our
results are clumsy and inelegant. Airplanes and helicopters employ the
same basic principles of flight as birds, bats, and insects, but they
fall pathetically short. The delicate hummingbird hovers with
breathtaking precision to dip its proboscis into a nectar-bearing flower
and then, in an instant, wheels and darts away. The albatross glides
inches over the ocean for hours on a trans-continental voyage with
barely a flap of its wings, riding the whisper of updraft that rises
from the water. The frigate bird stretches its wings wide to circle and
climb on thermals and then, spotting a fish in the ocean below, folds
them back and swoops in a sudden plunge.

Our advanced flying machines can certainly go higher and faster than
birds, but they consume vast amounts of energy in the effort and are
impossibly lacking in subtlety. Nature flies much more efficiently than
technology.

One of the great hopes for our energy future is solar power, and we
have applied our technological gifts to the design and manufacture of
contraptions that can convert sunlight into electricity. But even the
best minds on the planet with all the resources of modern science have
yet to develop anything remotely as efficient as the lowliest plant.
Plants are incredible solar factories that convert sunlight to sugar all
day, every day, in places cold and hot, wet and dry. And they do it
with virtually no waste, in complete silence.

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There are times, indeed, when nature seems perfect: a cheetah in
pursuit, an orchid flower receiving a bee, a towering redwood or a
perfect tomato ripening on the vine. One response to this apparent
perfection has been to conclude that nature is designed—the work of a
creator. The truth is much more inspiring, of course, and this world of
apparent perfection arose on its own, with no direction whatsoever, as
the myriad consequences of evolution.

Natural selection constantly hones living things to the utmost
efficiency within their environment. The speed of the cheetah is
repeatedly tested by the prey that attempts to outrun it, the orchid
flower is repeatedly tweaked to ensure that the right pollinators will
continue to visit, and the ripe tomato is constantly perfected by the
fruit-eaters to whom its sugary redness says, “Eat me, disperse me,
fertilize me.” It is those with the most successful arrangement of
traits—the fittest—that pass on their genes to the candidates of the
next generation most abundantly. Natural selection has spent 4 billion
years sorting the strong from the weak the fast from the slow and the
productive from the unproductive—it is the great machine of efficiency.
But natural selection is only part of the story of life. The other story
is sex.

Sex is expensive, it is risky, and it requires two organisms—often
three, in fact—to get together. It is a stunningly inefficient waste of
time and energy, and it is extraordinarily dangerous. Most importantly,
of course, in order to perform the fundamental task of transporting
genes from one generation to the next, sex is completely unnecessary.
And yet nearly all the big organisms on the planet go to great pains to
couple.

As far as the expense of sex is concerned, consider the leatherback
turtle. Here is an incredible animal, a relic of the age of the
dinosaurs that grows to about seven feet in length and weighs in at 600
pounds or more. It glides through the oceans all over the world,
snapping up squid from Greenland to Antarctica. But every summer, mature
female leatherbacks do the oddest thing. They swim thousands of miles
back to the tropics, to the very beach where they were born, and haul
their cumbersome backsides inch by clumsy inch up onto the sand. They
then dig a three-foot-deep hole in the sand with their flippers and lay
their eggs. At the end of the laying period, their job done, they swim
back to the other side of the world. That’s a very expensive trip.

To illustrate the dangers of sex, consider the peacock. Here is a
bird that must be a very tasty morsel for any number of predators in the
forest, so much so that it spends much of its life looking skittishly
over its shoulder to avoid getting eaten. But at breeding time, the
peacock throws all caution to the wind, displays an immense rosette of
brilliantly colored plumage, and struts around the forest like it’s
invincible. That’s a lot of risk to take on just to get laid. Or look at
the male praying mantis. He fusses around, finds a suitable mate, does
his best by her, and then how does she repay him? Right. She bites his
head off. What about elephant sex? Eek. That can’t be risk-free. Or porcupine sex—ouch.

Plants epitomize the logistical problems presented by sex. Here are
organisms that don’t move much, so their specialty is the threesome.
They coerce all manner of beasts—mostly flying ones—to serve as
go-betweens. The orchid family is particularly fantastic in this regard.
Orchids use highly specialized couriers to transport their sex cells
directly from the boy orchid organs on one flower to the girl orchid
organs on another. The orchid flowers have all their glorious shapes and
colors to attract the insect eye, not the human one. The insect reaches
for the nectar; the orchid exchanges its gametes. Why do the plants go
to all this trouble? Why do any of these life forms go to these (sometimes literal) pains?

The answer is well known, of course: Sex is required to provide
genetic variability. But what does “producing genetic variability”
really mean? Well, it means that while natural selection is busying
itself with the task of perfecting organisms for efficiency, sex is
doing the exact opposite. It is busying itself with screwing them up.
The fact that sex is essential to long-term survival on this planet is
self-evident. Any species that abandoned sex must have been eventually
whisked into extinction. Sex, then, is a system that shows phenomenal
evolutionary foresight—it plans for the future—but that makes no sense,
either. Evolution has no foresight whatsoever. It operates
strictly on a generation-to-generation basis and has no idea what traits
will be most successful in 1,000 generations.

Sex is best seen as a regulating device that tempers the tendency of
natural selection to ensnare species in an efficiency trap. Unregulated,
natural selection would repeatedly drive organisms to the highest level
of efficiency, but it would also drive them to the highest level of
simplicity. The most efficient organism, a success in its environment,
would out-compete less efficient individuals and natural selection would
drive the less efficient organisms into extinction. Eventually, the
most efficient individuals would be producing super-efficient identical
clones of themselves, and these offspring would be successful, too—but
only while the environment remained unchanged. Super-efficient clones
would benefit from the energy savings of abandoning sex in the short
term, but they could never last.

Changes in the environment, such as decreased rainfall, increased
temperatures, or lower humidity, might leave an organism high and dry in
a place to which it is no longer well adapted. Even more dangerous
would be changes in an organism’s food supply or adaptation in its
predators and parasites. Unable to respond to changing threats,
super-efficient clones would lose their edge and find themselves
vulnerable. No longer able to evolve apace with the rest of the
biological world, their eventual demise would be assured.

We seem to have great faith in the capacity of efficiency solutions
to avert the confluence of environmental and economic problems we face.
The gathering storm of climate change, largely the consequence of
burning fossil fuels, is intimately linked to our looming energy crisis
as fossil fuel reserves decline. These two wicked problems seem to have
the same solution: Use fossil fuels more efficiently. I’m sorry, but
that’s a short-term fix that merely clones a doomed experiment in the
hopes that it can keep going a few years longer.

Much more valuable would be to develop a more diverse portfolio of
energy sources, but the problem of efficiency looms here, too. We seem
to be trying to plug new energy sources into the centralized system that
we developed and streamlined over the last century. We’re hoping for
bigger, more efficient wind farms, solar arrays, and biofuel refineries.
If only we can make these (mostly) more benign energy sources more
efficient, we say, our energy crisis can be averted. Let’s swap out the
nasty hydrocarbons for clean, green alternatives. If only it were that
simple.

Our ability to extract natural resources, to compete, to develop new
technologies and to streamline our business develops apace: We become
increasingly efficient. But our resilience erodes. We lack checks and
balances; we lose diversity and robustness; we find ourselves perfectly
adapted to the world as it is. But what if the world should change?

To find our steady state and solve the sustainability puzzle our
greatest needs are neither more energy sources nor more efficiency.
Rather, we need to abandon the delusion that growth is a measure of
progress. Only progress in diversity and beauty can stand the test of
time. So relax, take it easy, spend more time with the one you love, and
remember: The key to a sustainable future is sex.

The true genius of ecosystems is not their ability to keep growing
and consuming, but to adapt, and more than 1 billion years after sex
first evolved, it remains a requirement for long-term survival. It is
expensive, risky and cumbersome, but life on earth has found through
bitter experience that the surest path to extinction is to abstain from
sex and fall into the efficiency trap. The antidote for efficiency in
the natural world is sex. We need to find similar antidotes to
efficiency in the modern world.

2 comments:

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I am an entrepreneur. I have owned a grocery store, restaurant, published a weekly periodical, owned a video store chain, run a coffee-sandwich shop, and have extensive experience in real estate (sales, development, & as a general contractor). Over the last few years, I worked as preservationist of a historical property (rehabing an 1864 mill building). Founder, President of India Museum and Heritage Society in Providence. Past President of India Association of RI. Past Member Heritage Harbor Museum Board.
New England Republican Council.